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Yesterday I set out a case why Booty Grab is pretty much irrelevant on Gaia. That was kind of painful to write, but I like to pride myself on being able to face data, no matter how ugly.

Today....*sigh* this hurts more, but this is the story the numbers tell.

Background: As I've mentioned before, I keep fairly detailed spreadsheets in Excel on my tanks. I have a pretty good idea, down to pretty much the individual gold, about my profit and loss on each tank. Often calculated multiple ways, whether one counts Overseer or not.

Here is a clipping from one of my spreadsheets. It shows my actual income from selling fish drops for the month of April up through yesterday.

Here's the thing to notice: for every single low end fish available in Phin Phang for gold, the drop sold for MORE than the fish cost. Every. Single. Time.

What does this mean? Simple. If I fill a tank with gruckens or rooseters or ravens, I don't need One. Single. Player. to make a profit. Not one. In the current inflationary economy, turning the fish into drops is enough. I don't even need to collect the Overseer crap.

This has actually been going on for longer than just the last month. I used only April's number because I know walls of numbers tend to glaze over people's eyes.

This doesn't work with higher end fish - even though I got a nicer price for Walker drops or Flying Coatl drops, they don't come close to what the fish cost in the MP. You still need players for them.

But here's my question: is it worth it? Sure, you make more gold on the more expensive fish when people play them, but twice jack sh*t is *still* jack sh*t when you compare it to the price of, oh, say, a current monthly collectable. And as we all have seen from the player counts, players these days are almost as rare as hen's teeth. (And as I wrote yesterday, don't expect that to change any time soon unless Gaia makes some large changes to Booty Grab to make it relevant again.)

I'm not arguing for not playing people's tanks. Or even not running a high end tank. Those are subjects I want to write about in more depth in the next couple of days. But once again, it's not to become one of the Gaian Rich anymore. That path is closed.

So, you just made me realize my dolphin drops are worth over 300k now. I just listed five of them. I also just realized the Special tab of my inventory is worth many millions. I've got lots of unopened monthly letters (20-30 mil each), gift trunks and boxes of all flavors, strike packs etc.

I'd be more excited if any of that meant jack sh*t. For now I just yawned and didn't bother listing anything except those few dolphin drops. My fortune in gold does not have the buying power it once did and I STILL feel like I have more gold than I need. Not because I have that many zeros behind my total but because Gaia has pretty much killed my interest in their pixel items.

BTW - at your comment in yesterday's journal entry - "watching a train wreck" is a phrase I have used several times regarding what is currently happening with Gaia. I totally agree.